Manifesto

Every leader, every organisation, every human life moves in S-curves.

You begin something new – a role, a strategy, a company – and at first it’s hard, and you feel like you are going backwards. Then something clicks, momentum builds, and for a while things work. You grow, you succeed, you get good at what you do. Then, gradually or suddenly, the curve flattens. What got you here stops getting you further. The energy of this particular chapter is spent.

This is Charles Handy’s sigmoid curve – one of the most honest descriptions of how growth actually works.

Handy’s radical insight was this: the time to start the next curve is before the first one ends. While you still have energy, momentum, and resources. Not when you’re already in decline and desperate. The leaders and organisations who figure this out – who can see the inflection point coming and make the jump – are the ones who sustain relevance over time.

But here’s what rarely gets talked about. The jump itself and the messy middle it puts you in.

What actually happens in the gap

Between letting go of the first curve and finding your footing on the second, there is a space. A passage. An in-between.

It’s what anthropologists call liminal space – from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. You’re neither here nor there. What worked before has stopped working. What comes next hasn’t taken shape yet. The old identity, the old playbook, the old way of operating – none of it applies, and you know it. But the new one isn’t available yet either.

This is the messy middle.

And it is deeply uncomfortable – not because something has gone wrong, but because this is what transition actually feels like from the inside. The disorientation isn’t a sign of failure. It’s the process doing its work.

Most people interpret this discomfort as stuckness. They’re not stuck. They’re lost. And the distinction matters enormously.

• Stuck means inertia – you haven’t let go, you haven’t moved, the first curve still has its hooks in you. Stuck people need to break inertia.
• Lost means movement without orientation – you’ve already let go, you’ve committed to the forward motion, but you can’t yet see the landmarks. Lost people don’t need to start moving. They need to find their bearings while they keep going.

The compass isn’t the same as the destination. You don’t need to see the other side to navigate toward it. You need enough orientation to keep moving in a consistent direction – find the river, follow the river to the road, follow the road to something recognisable. Getting unlost is an active, dynamic process, not a passive waiting for clarity to arrive.

Why this is now a leadership-critical skill

For most of human history, sigmoid curves were spread out. You’d have one major transition every decade or two. There was time to recover, reorient, and rebuild before the next inflection arrived.

That is no longer the world we’re in.

Technology, geopolitics, market disruption, organisational complexity – the pace of change is compressing these cycles. Leaders who used to navigate one significant transition every ten years are now navigating several simultaneously, often with barely enough breathing room between them. The curves are stacking on top of each other. Liminality is becoming less of an exceptional passage and more of a permanent condition of leadership at this level.

This changes what the most valuable leadership skill actually is.

Knowledge – what to do, which framework to apply, the right answer to the presenting problem – is no longer the scarce resource. In a world where artificial intelligence can synthesise and surface information faster than any human, the leaders who believe their competitive advantage is what they know are already behind. Knowledge has been democratised. It is effectively free.

What remains scarce – and what is becoming more valuable by the day – is the capacity to execute in conditions of uncertainty. To keep moving when you can’t see the next landmark. To stay present and functional when the nervous system is screaming for the safety of the familiar. To complete the passage you’re already in, rather than retreating to the comfort of the one you’ve already left.

This is wisdom, not knowledge. And it lives in the body as much as in the head.

What execution in liminality actually requires

Understanding that you’re in the messy middle – having a name for it, recognising its contours – is the first move. It shifts the experience from I am broken and failing to this is what transition feels like, and I have been here before, and there is a way through. That reframe alone changes what’s possible.

But naming it isn’t enough. You still have to move.

“When you are going through hell, keep going.”

Winston Churchill

The instinct, almost universally, is to either push harder with what used to work (force your way through as the person you were) or to retreat (go back, abandon the leap, return to the first curve). Both are counterproductive. The first is how you exhaust yourself doing the wrong things with great intensity. The second isn’t actually available – the ships are burned, the first curve is spent, and going back only returns you to what was already ending.

The only direction is forward. And forward requires a specific set of capacities:

• The ability to stay present while the discomfort does its work. Not managing it, not eliminating it, not outrunning it. Staying inside the moment long enough for the pressure to refine away what no longer belongs. What you carry out of the messy middle – the identity, the capacities, the leadership – is different from what you carried in. That transformation requires time inside the crucible.
• The ability to read the system and act decisively on partial information. You will never have complete visibility in liminality. Waiting for certainty before moving is what gets people genuinely stuck. The navigator’s skill – finding a bearing from the available landmarks, committing to a direction, adjusting as you go – is the executive skill that matters.
• The ability to regulate under sustained pressure. This is more physical than it sounds. The nervous system under chronic uncertainty shifts into threat response – fight, flight, or freeze – and from that state, good decisions are harder to make, relationships are harder to sustain, and the very cognitive flexibility you need most becomes least available. The leaders who move well through liminal passages are not the ones who feel less pressure; they’re the ones who have developed capacity to carry more of it without collapsing under it.
• The ability to let go of what you carried in. Perhaps the hardest part. The identity, the assumptions, the methods that built the first curve – they feel like assets. They are. They were. But the second curve requires a different version of you, and that version can only emerge if the old one is genuinely set down. You cannot drag the past into the future and call it transformation.

What this means going forward

The leaders who will navigate the next decade well are not the ones with the most knowledge or the most sophisticated frameworks. Artificial intelligence is a better framework repository than any human could be.

They are the ones who can:

• Recognise the inflection point before it becomes a crisis.
• Begin the next curve while there is still energy in the current one.
• Move through the messy middle without retreating or collapsing.
• Emerge from each passage with more capacity than they entered with.
• Do it again – sooner than last time, with less disorientation than before.

Because this is the nature of leadership now. Not one big transition carefully managed. A recurring rhythm of them, arriving faster, overlapping more, demanding more of the whole system – body, mind, relationships, culture – each time.

The question isn’t whether you’ll face a messy middle. You’re almost certainly already in one. The question is what you do inside it.

Don’t try it alone

This is yours to do. No one can complete it for you. But it is a mistake to try to do it alone – not a sign of strength, but a miscalculation. The trapeze artist doesn’t catch themselves. The right company doesn’t rescue you from the middle; it keeps you honest inside it, holds the complexity without collapsing it, and stays until the work is genuinely done, and you become ready for what comes next.